Book review

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European
Eyes, 1250–1625

Daud Ali

This impressively erudite, well researched, and eloquently written book
by Joan Pau Rubiés analyses the development of Iberian and Italian
travellers' accounts of south India over three hundred years. Beginning
with the medieval merchant travellers Marco Polo in the thirteenth
century and ending with the humanist antiquarian Pietro della Valle
in the early seventeenth century, the book in ten detailed chapters
traces the course of travel narratives, providing major new interpretations
of the more well known narratives figures Nicolò Conti, Duarte Barbosa,
Domingos Paes, Fernão Nunes and Roberto de Nobili, as well as treating
largely neglected figures like Lodovico Varthema, or previously
inaccessible sources, like Antonio Rubino's hitherto unpublished
Account of the main things of the kingdom of Vijayanagara (1608).
The book provides the most exhaustive account in English of Portuguese
travellers in India to date. It will be of keen interest as much
to scholars of early modern India, who have been rethinking the
dynamics of this period, as to historians of Europe and the early
colonial encounter.

At the most general level, the book makes an important
and convincing argument, more demonstrably than polemically, that the
popularly used paradigm of 'Orientalism', in which European knowledge
of the Orient is seen as a mere instrument of 'power' hopelessly caught
up in a solipsistic fantasy of the 'other', is deeply inadequate for any
historical understanding of the nature of these accounts. Rubiés eschews
the idea that travellers (much like historians) are hopelessly trapped
by their own assumptions determined by their class positions, irrational
prejudices, or own subjective consciousness. Rubiés opposes these views,
in particular the latter position of 'radical relativism', by suggesting
a model of 'language games'. This model does not ignore the specific 'interests'
and predispositions of the traveller (and indeed, the informer), but rather
poses them as domains within which cultural understanding may occur. Cultures
are usefully understood as 'language games', rules of communication specific
to social situations. Cross cultural representation may then be understood,
within the framework of 'translation' - that is, of learning language-games
of other peoples.

This perspective allows Rubiés to pose the central
problem of his book as 'under what conditions did travel literature become
a form of translation'. The answer to this question is dependent on a
two-fold contextualisation. First, Rubiés places his accounts within the
contexts of both expanding European trading networks in the Indian ocean
and particularly with the evolution of Portuguese interests in the subcontinent,
and also the empire of Vijayanagara (1346-1565) the predominantly 'Hindu'
power of South India during a time when large parts of northern and central
India were ruled by independent Muslim sultanates. Second, and perhaps
more importantly, Rubiés places his sources within the intellectual and
historiographical traditions of both renaissance Europe and early modern
India. Though the author has navigated the waters of medieval south Indian
history with remarkable perceptiveness, the most valuable parts of the
book remain his acute observations about the intellectual contexts and
discursive categories operating in his own sources. He brilliantly demonstrates
how, for example, Marco Polo's ability to serve a pagan lord is not justified
by any separation of politics and religion, but through an idea of providence
- that where ever there is power and law there also must be faith. Later,
in introducing the Portuguese accounts of Vijayanagar, he points out very
perceptively that an obvious, but very consequential difference between
the chronicles written at the imperial centre and the historical accounts
by the agents of the king in India is the diminished role that the king
plays as an actor in the traveller's narratives. It is these sort of observations,
everywhere apparent in the book, that will make it a landmark in the study
of 'early modern' representations of the Orient.

Perhaps the most important argument the book makes,
presaged by its title, is that travel writing in Europe was an important
source of the Enlightenment science of 'ethnology'. This bold claim connects
travel writing within the larger intellectual and political transformations
in Europe between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Crucial is the
figure of traveller, independent from direct religious and imperial authority,
exercising his rational critical powers to 'translate' the language games
of foreign cultures. Rubiés's formulation is quite sophisticated here.
He maintains that while the horizons of travellers' discourse were not
determined from within, but instead made possible by the legitimising
power of changing attitudes among humanist-educated élites, it is also
the case that travel literature came to mediate between the philosophical
questions debated by humanists, and the 'empirical reality of human diversity
which had now become essential to any answers'. By the 17th century travel
writing was a powerful voice liberated from economic, religious and political
concern, and would become a new authority in the emerging Enlightenment
'science of mankind'.

Chapter by chapter, Rubiés shows that the evolution
of travel writing and its contexts was gradual. Varthema's narrative,
for example, though positing itself as the creation of an independent
and de-contextualised individual, still required a humanist interlocutor.
This independent persona was subjected to new pressures by Iberian imperialism,
which brought with it new administrative exigencies requiring knowledge
production as well as reading publics at home in Europe. But the political
context also allowed new possibilities. Rubiés argues that the Portuguese
empire builders articulated shifting political identities with local powers
which departed from the idealist emphasis of traditional ideologies and
which indicated that a new secularly defined space of understanding was
gradually emerging in which other cultures could be classified. The travellers
accounts, even within the penumbra of empire, deployed an increasingly
comparative approach to human diversity, relying on the authority of observation
alone order to establish truth claims. In his readings of the famous accounts
of Nunes and Paes, Rubiés shows how this vision acquired chronological
depth and addressed fundamental problems of historical interpretation
through naturalistic and secular rather than metaphysical frameworks of
order. Rubiés sees the 17th century figures of Nobili and Della Valle
as exemplifying two different responses to human diversity at the threshold
of the Enlightenment, which, while in different camps, both shared a common
challenge to the older conventional way of describing behaviours without
analysing beliefs.

Rubiés has provided a masterful integration of his
sources with the main currents of European thought. Though he provides
an extremely complex picture of the European intellectual context, and
the role of the traveller's account within it, there is a tendency toward
seeing a general shift in intellectual environments from clerical/religious/traditional
to secular/scientific/critical. Rubiés' distinctions are often subtle,
as in his argument that the writings of the missionary Roberto di Nobili
reveal a changed environment within religious discourse which allowed
for a new understanding of gentile religions as part of their own cultural
systems. But such subtleties aside, one occasionally wonders how convincing
Rubiés overall narrative of European thought can really be. Rubiés clearly
doesn't see the stated claims of humanist science as a set of ideological
claims in their own right, as some have done. Rather, he celebrates humanist
scientific values as the most effective mode of coming to terms with 'the
fact of human diversity'.

The implicit value judgements of this study are revealed
by certain remarks in the author's otherwise commendable and largely sympathetic
treatment Hindu and Muslim sources. While finding many cultural similarities
between Deccani Muslim and Vijayanagar accounts on the one hand and those
of the Portuguese on the other, Rubies nevertheless concludes that the
Portuguese had a clearly 'superior' approach to cultural understanding
than either Hindus, dominated by mythic 'cyclical time' or Muslims, preoccupied
with a jihad centred way of writing history. For the South Asian historian,
these images are as unfortunate as they are stereotyped, and despite Rubies
commendable attempt to read the Persian and Sanskrit/Telugu sources in
translation, don't really tell us enough about indigenous knowledge systems.

But to return to Europe, one wonders why critical
approaches to humanism and enlightenment values, now widely debated, have
not been addressed, even by way of disagreement, in such a deeply contextualising
and sensitive book. There are those thinkers, for example, who have suggested
that the rising discourses of empiricism, historicism, humanism and 'enlightenment'
in complex ways actually 're-occupied' some of the transcendental roles
which they had sought to displace. And like the 'ideologies' from which
these currents sought to distance themselves, they too had their own boundaries,
coercions, and 'rules' of play. In this respect, Rubies' structural typology
for understanding cultural contact is perhaps not radical enough. Though
understanding cultures as 'language games' - coherent systems of meaning
- Rubies tends to see translation as a universal process, a rational negotiation
of 'human diversity'. But can we not gain something important by seeing
'translation' itself as a 'language-game', or more properly, following
Foucault, a 'truth game' governed by its own assumptions and rules of
operation? The 'fact' of human cultural diversity in this framework would
not necessarily be a 'fact' at all, but an a priori assumption coherent
within a particular language game. Foucault in his The Order of Things
suggested that in medieval knowledge systems difference was not perceived
within the framework of self and other, nor the diversity of discrete
and incommensurable objects, but rather through a hieratic order of resemblances.
Foucault went on to provide a historical account and critique of the 'classical'
and humanist system which replaced this order. Though the author may not
agree with such methods or conclusions, some treatment of this scholarship,
and more importantly, knowledge itself as a language game could open up
his material to new perspectives and add another dimension to an already
impressive and powerful book.